Katy Morgan-Davies, 33, waived her legal right to anonymity after living her whole life in Comrade Bala’s south London revolutionary collective.
Balakrishnan, 75, ran the Workers Institute of Marxism-Leninsim-Mao Zedong Thought from 1976 to 2013 and was sentenced at Southwark crown court on Friday for his daughter’s false imprisonment, child cruelty and the rape, sexual assault and assault of two other female followers.
Presenting herself to the media for the first time, Morgan-Davies told how her father was “a narcissist and a psychopath” whose actions were “horrible, so dehumanising and degrading”. She called on him to “recognise what he did was wrong”.
Balakrishnan ruled the small, mainly female collective with violence and psychological terror, including threatening members with an electronic satellite warfare machine he called Jackie and claimed would strike them dead if they stepped out of line.
Morgan-Davies said she wanted people to know who she was “to retrieve the identity the cult tried to steal from me” after spending the first 30 years of her life inside Balakrishnan’s collective which he set up on a mission to bring down the “British fascist state”.
The trial jury heard how he beat his daughter as a young child, would not allow her to play with other children and did not let her go out of the commune alone until she finally escaped in October 2013, aged 30.
When she left, her carers said she had the life skills of a six-year-old, with no knowledge of how to cross the road or use domestic appliances.
Her new name represents a rejection of what she was called in the collective, Prem Maopinduzi, meaning “love revolution” in Hindi and Swahili.
She said it was inspired in part by the Katy Perry song Roar, which talks of empowerment and finding your own voice.
“It is about not being put down, coming back, standing up for yourself.”
Morgan-Davies said she wanted to escape from being the “non-person” she was under her father who “was just obsessed about control”.
“The people he looked up to were people like Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein,” she said. “You couldn’t criticise them either in the house. They were his gods and his heroes.”
At the same time, she said, Balakrishnan wanted to be first among dictators.
“Sometimes he would say he didn’t like Mao, because he saw Mao as a rival to him as well,” she said.
“So he sort of followed them and wanted to be like them, but at the same time he didn’t want them to be worshipped, except as secondary to him. [He wanted to be] bigger than all of them.”
She said their cult was seen as a “pilot unit” where Balakrishnan could learn “how best to control people” before he took over the world.
Morgan-Davies was born to Sian Davies, one of Balakrishnan’s small group of followers, but Balakrishnan was married to another collective member and he lied to “Prem” that her parents were dead.
She only found her relation to Davies when her mother lay dying in hospital after an unexplained fall from a commune window in 1996 following a mental breakdown.
“I remember I used to dream about her a lot, and I used to wake up crying,” Morgan-Davies said. “I used to dream that I said: ‘I know you are my mum’. Or I would say: ‘I didn’t know you were my mum, nice to meet you as my mum’. I would hug her – things she never used to do in real life. Then I would wake up and I would cry.”
She spoke of her new-found joy at the freedom to do “things like dying my hair or piercing my ears or having an alcoholic drink – something just small might not mean much to most people but for me it does. Just having that choice, being free to make that choice, that is the main thing.”
Other pleasures included having her own key and being able to come and go as she pleased.
Morgan-Davies said she was now making up for her lack of any formal education by studying English and maths at college, where she was making friends with classmates.
“The main thing is I have joined the Labour party,” she said. “I have been out canvassing and made a lot of friends there and get to do a lot of different things. I also get to go to different locations.”
Starved of love and companionship in the collective, Morgan-Davies would retreat into fantasy and tried to befriend rats and mice she heard scuttling under the floor.
“I used to sit there and look at them and hope that I could pet them. They would come and look and I used to think they were smiling at me almost, telling me everything would be alright.”
Josephine Herivel, the commune member who helped Morgan-Davies flee the commune, has since said she deeply regrets the decision and that she believes Balakrishnan is innocent.
Last month she told the Guardian: “I have to help clear AB’s name. It is such an injustice. It is all wrong. It is hard to think that life has gone.”
Herivel has been diagnosed with Stockholm syndrome, which occurs with hostages and trafficking victims, but rejects that assessment.
In a comment apparently directed at Herivel, Morgan-Davies said: “In a way all of us were like slaves – mentally as well – to his control for so many years, and some still are.”
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